Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  Just then Naramutro twisted swiftly in a complex turn, falling away and behind and tossing the ball toward one of his friends. But Taj was ready. He slipped sideways, spilling air from his flight wings and twisting violently in a move that made the quillions on his wings whistle. He caught the ball just ahead of the girl’s scoop and fell away as she yelled in frustration.

  He heard Elli laugh. “Air too thick for you, Nara?” she crowed.

  Naramutro didn’t reply, and instead stooped viciously on Taj, coming far closer than he should have. But Taj didn’t flinch. Instead, he spread his wings and turned to meet him. The maneuver created a whirl of wind that spoiled the other boy’s lift and caused Naramutro to spiral away for a few seconds in a clumsy flutter.

  Naramutro flew back toward him and hovered. “Is that how you want it, mudfoot?” Then, not waiting for an answer, he threw back his head and shouted, “Suraki!”

  The cry was taken up by some of the others. “Suraki, suraki!”

  “No!” shouted Elli. “You know it’s forbidden!” But her voice was lost in the swelling chorus as a swirl of flyers descended around them. Taj yielded the ball to one of them, who had motioned for it. Was this what Mari had referred to in the simulator down on Sundara?

  But then the girl he’d thrown the ball to tossed it down, and someone else swooped under, caught it, and then launched it farther down, toward the distant surface. Taj watched for a moment, then joined in: He caught it, then tossed it down. A few more kids did the same, then Naramutro swooped, caught, and tossed. It seemed too simple: everyone was taking turns; there was no longer any apparent competition.

  While he waited his next turn, he saw Ama circling above. Her face was creased with worry—she shouted something to him, but he couldn’t hear. He looked for Elli but didn’t see her.

  Slowly he became aware that, one by one, the others were dropping out of the game, pulling up to fly in lazy circles above the dwindling number of players below, so his turn, and Naramutro’s, came closer and closer together. Finally, only they were left. All the other flyers watched from above, scattered across the sky below the increasingly distant diffusers.

  Taj’s arms and chest were beginning to hurt, but he wouldn’t give up. When the other boy swooped under him to catch the ball he saw that Naramutro’s face was set in fierce concentration, mixed with what looked like increasing desperation.

  They spiraled lower and lower. Taj’s breath came raggedly and his chest muscles felt like they were on fire. It was getting harder and harder to move his flight wings.

  Then, abruptly, it was over. Naramutro tossed the ball down and then groaned in defeat as Taj swooped down and caught it. The other boy turned and climbed slowly away.

  Taj turned to follow, but his wings felt strangely heavy. Naramutro seemed to be climbing faster now, and Taj couldn’t keep up—he wasn’t even sure he was really climbing.

  A few minutes later he was sure he wasn’t—no matter what he did, he kept sinking. He could barely move his flight wings now; they felt like lead.

  Suddenly the ball still held in his scoop expanded with a loud pop and escaped. Startled, Taj watched it dwindle swiftly upward, toward the aerie now lost in the dazzle of the diffusers high above.

  And then he remembered. . . The farther an object is from the spin axis—the lower it is—the heavier it gets, and the change with altitude is much greater than on a planet or in a gravitor-equipped habitat. Now he knew why Gee-Em had been so insistent about the orientation vid.

  With a muffled crack, his lift wings collapsed and the rushing air forced his flight wings and arms up over his head. He was falling. The surface of Talajara rushed up to meet him.

  Suraki.

  Icarus inverted.

  He’d flown too low.

  Then something slapped at him in a vicious double concussion and he passed out.

  ∞

  Taj opened his eyes and blinked in confusion. He was floating in the center of the strangest room he’d ever seen, with furniture, plants, tapestries, paintings and statues, and even bookcases on every surface. He couldn’t figure out where the floor was, or the ceiling, or if those terms even meant anything here.

  Hearing a rustle of cloth, he turned. Beside him was Gee-Em, but her bubble was nowhere to be seen, and Taj realized he was in her home at the spin axis of Talajara. The double concussion that knocked him out must have been her geebubble accelerating to transonic speed to rescue him.

  She looked at him in silence for a long time.

  “You didn’t watch the orientation, did you? You didn’t know about the Suraki Effect.”

  Taj felt his face flush. “Not the whole thing. When they mentioned Icarus, I . . . uhh . . . They called me Icky at school. I didn’t want to hear about it.” Taj felt his eyes burning; he resolved fiercely that he wasn’t going to cry. Gee-Em would never sponsor him to a commission now, not after such a stupid mistake.

  “I’ve seen your simulator chips, both naval and flight,” she said. “You are quite good, actually. There was really only one lesson remaining, although I had not intended it to be quite so dramatic.”

  Taj felt his throat closing up with the effort not to weep. “Wha . . . what?” he choked out.

  Her fierce blue eyes transfixed him. “You tell me.” Her voice was flat.

  Oh, Telos, he hated it when adults did this. He opened his mouth to reply that he’d learned that gravity in a highdwelling changed far faster with altitude than on a planet, but he stopped himself. Meeting her merciless gaze, he knew that wasn’t the answer. He’d known that, but he’d still almost killed himself.

  But what did she want? If he didn’t answer correctly, he knew she’d write him off without hesitation.

  Unbidden, Mari’s voice came back to him. But you’re a downsider, and so is Flugel.

  Flugel had thought the WingWorld sim would teach him what he needed to know, but WingWorld was a hollowed-out asteroid with a gravity generator at its center—fourspace-distortion gravity, like a planet, with the same almost imperceptible gradient with altitude. There was no Suraki Effect.

  But Flugel was a downsider and hadn’t thought of the Suraki Effect. Or hadn’t known.

  Suddenly it was clear.

  “No matter how real it seems, a sim is just someone else’s idea of reality,” said Taj. “If they don’t know something, or overlook it, it won’t be there, and you can’t learn it.” He thought a moment longer, encouraged by the first hint of a smile on the nuller’s deeply lined face.

  “And what they don’t know can kill you.”

  Gee-Em smiled broadly. “You’ll do, Tajarivani. I’ve known a few naval officers who learned that lesson only too late, so you’ll be ahead of the game at the Academy.” She reached over and tabbed a control on a legless table floating nearby.

  “Now greet your friends, who’ve been really worried about you.”

  Ama, Elli, and Tulli came in, followed, to Taj’s amazement, by Naramutro. Taj laughed. Somehow, he was sure he wouldn’t be seeing the inside of a simulator again until he got to the Academy.

  And that was just fine with him.

  The Honor of the Ferrocarril

  Sylvia Kelso

  It’s currently my favourite because it came out of nowhere, let me combine two forms, steampunk and vampire story, that I thought were far too hackneyed to bother with, produced some great characters, and included a thoroughly spooky coincidence (when I thought I’d invented a steampunk gadget out of whole cloth, only to find one of my most spookily coincidental fellow readers had actually seen one). And finally, because “Ferrocarril” introduced me, via the back-research, to the amazing railways of South America.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As the Internationale pulled out of La Paz station, the man at the window beside Concepçion Gonzaga leant over and made a proposition that took her breath away.

  “Beautiful señora, permit my little bat to share your room tonight, and I will see you attain immortality.”

 
; The locomotive blew pressure for the first zigzag up to El Alto, a blast of steam that blotted the view and drowned human chatter; but not his urgently muttering voice.

  “A very little bat, señora, his wings cannot span my forearm, very rare and very precious. He came to me on the Altiplano, alone, solitary, unique. I must carry him safe to Arequipa. If you permit him in your cabin, señora, only tonight . . .”

  Concepçion got out the first word she found.

  “What?”

  “My bat, señora. My little, little, precious bat.” Anxious eyes squinted down at her from a seamed, Indian-dark face. Full Aymara, or even Uro, she classified automatically, from round Lake Titicaca. Guaqui, by the colors in his serape. “Only the one night, I swear to you.” His hair trailed lankly over a high forehead sheened with oil or sweat. “And I promise, I promise, immortality—” The reek of coca leaves breathed through his yellowed teeth.

  Concepçion withdrew her head and said crisply, “My soul is already immortal, if I heed the priest. But what is this of the bat?”

  The locomotive braked to reverse for the switch-point to the zigzag’s second leg. The man looming over her wrung his hands.

  “They will not permit him in the carriages, señora, and I cannot uncage him in the luggage van. He must stretch his wings, could you travel five hundred miles with your arms bound down? You are a great lady, I hear them speak of you. The Cuzco line-chief’s wife, good-hearted as her husband, and he the best foreman on the Ferrocarril. The governor has a stateroom. El Presidente del Ferrocarril has a stateroom, all the honorable señores of La Paz have staterooms. And you, you have a stateroom. Of your mercy, this one small favour. Only this one night.”

  He was tall for an Indian, almost skeletal under the serape. Concepçion stared up at him and saw instead Edouard’s narrow black eyes, his sudden smile, the deceptively flamboyant sweep of his moustache. Yes, she thought. After thirty years, Señor Meiggs’s Southern Peru Railway is finally open, clear from La Paz to the sea. For this inaugural journey, I have first class passage, in honor of Edouard. Who, on the face of those perfidious Andes just below La Raya, was kind once too often. And some lazy, stupid ganger’s mistake cost him his life.

  But if Edouard had been kind, he was also nobody’s fool.

  “Señor,” she said, “it is true, all the fine señores of La Paz have staterooms. For such a recompense one will doubtless favour you. I am a widow, of no great rank. But my honor demands that, even for immortality, such an offer I must decline.”

  She stepped back, past his shoulder, away from the window where the hewn side of the second incline was sliding past, and without looking the other way to the magnificent vista of green-patterned La Paz valley, with the white city at its heart and Illimani’s sugar-crystal snows above, she went into the stateroom Edouard had earned her, and closed the door.

  ∞

  Four hours later she stopped staring at the bleak tan and treeless vistas of the Altiplano, and began to doff her good navy suit. As the first twilight dimmed Sorata and Illimani’s receding peaks, the major domo, murmuring mechanically, “An honor,” ushered her into the dining car. Eyeing the vista of glistening silver, crystal and white tablecloth beyond him, she braced herself for the doubtless endless orations ahead.

  Her three table-companions bowed her into a chair and forgot about her. Upper-level office people, she judged, from Lima, perhaps. Criollos, by their almost arrogant confidence, maybe with an actual Spanish Peninsular ancestor only a generation back. But they mentioned Don Enrique Meiggs with nostalgic approval too. They even drank an impromptu toast as Lake Titicaca glinted briefly under a sunset-filled sky. “A man whose visions endure, five years into this new century. And humane beyond parallel!”

  Too humane, Concepçion retorted silently, smoothing the high lace tucker of her best grey silk. If Don Enrique knew enough to hire Edouard, he was far too gentle with those Chilean rotos, not to mention Chinese coolies, that he used to build his tracks. Whose clumsy stupidity at a landslide—

  She stopped herself with the harshness of long experience. Now the others were laughing about the “loco hombre Indios.”

  “Special, precious, unique, forsooth! If ’tis so small, the thing is only another vampire bat! Found it battening on his cattle, and persuaded himself ‘tis a hudu—or a brujo itself!”

  “Ha ha! And how does he think to feed it, on such a train as this? A freight now, with a couple of cattle-cars—”

  “Oh, have no concern, señores. He will call manna from heaven—thus anyone kind enough to house his bat is sure of immortality!”

  The locomotive whistled for a siding, a long, long wail that rose to an ear-shrilling scream. As points clacked and whitewashed adobe houses slid past, Concepçion said carefully, “So, señores. Did all decline his offer, then?”

  They met her eyes from sheer surprise. Then all three pomaded, mustachioed, evening-dressed dandies seemed to lose their tongues. Not merely embarrassed, or surprised, or even scandalized. Perhaps, she wondered, a touch of fear?

  So the Indian had disturbed them too.

  Then the man opposite exclaimed, “Dios mios, did you hear that whistle? One of the new Baldwin locomotives. Eight drivers, amazing traction. And the whistle, it was never done before—the whistle climbs a scale!”

  “Never before, probably never after.” The man beside Concepçion laughed. “Though they say its top note outdoes La Melba’s best—”

  “No, no, La Melba is a lyric soprano, amazing high range, but this whistle can span six octaves—!”

  But the first speaker had risen at the official table, and Concepçion braced herself.

  When she felt it acceptable to slip away, the third speaker had concluded, and the dining car was a glittering bubble afloat on the Altiplano’s dark. Easing into the dimmed connection-tube, she chided herself: you are the widow of a line foreman, gone these twenty years. Why should these manos blancos recall a forty-year-old relict like you?

  So how, she wondered suddenly, did the Indian know?

  She released the Patent Steam-Pressure Door Seal Don Enrique had required for all his trains. Powered by steam, yes, Edward fulminated in her ear, but what when the steam stops? Then she stepped into the first-class car and voices hissed, “Señora, por favor!”—“Señora Gonzaga, venga por aqui!”

  Only the shadowy blue of Southern Peru Rail uniforms persuaded her to comply. They were huddled at the further car end, and the closer she came, the more their postures, their anxious dancing motions, alarmed her in turn. Halting short of the last stateroom, she said, “Señores?”

  Their stances relaxed. They came to her with careful celerity. “Señora,” the taller one bowed hurriedly, “as a favor, we ask, we beg for your advice.”

  “There is a—a situation.” The shorter man gestured back up the train. “All the Ferrocarril officers are at dinner, the guard, the major domo, are inside or beyond the dining car—but something must be done!”

  “Why,” Concepçion asked blankly, “come to me?”

  “But señora!!” Hands flew up. “You are of the Ferrocarril—Señor Gonzaga’s wife! And he said, he always said, his wife was very—very wise.”

  In the half-light Concepçion could barely catch the liquid glint of eyes, but something about their manner, the entire situation, prickled her spine. Why should she be counted wise?

  Did they believe she was like her grandmother?

  “Señores,” she said abruptly, “do you think me a bruja?”

  “No, no, señora, never, never, we crave your pardon, no one thought of such a thing. But Edouard—Señor Gonzaga always said—you were very wise.”

  They stared then in a silence that drove her brain into its highest gear. A situation, what situation would leave seasoned rail-crew paralyzed? What situation could demand a higher ranking decision, from anyone who would serve to make it—even a dead foreman’s wife they half-feared was a witch?

  The train blew for a crossing and the rumble of trac
ks jerked her back to life. They were approaching Guaqui. The rising panic in the men’s movements insisted on action, now, but it need only be a stop-gap, until the station, until someone else could take command.

  “Show me,” she said.

  ∞

  The body lay on its back in the second-class galley entrance, sprawled like a broken sack of potatoes. Loose trousers, fawn workman’s shirt, a disordered serape. Second- or third-class passenger, Concepçion guessed; young, by the shape. The arms had fallen wide, one leg was drawn up. She had time to see the black substance pooling widely round the left shoulder before the stench struck.

  “Phew!”

  Concepçion had been at deathbeds, had coped with the details dramatic novels carefully left out. But no deathbed had brought a stench like this.

  Then she identified its source.

  “What is that round him? That black stuff?”

  “We do not know, señora!” Both men had recoiled with her. “We have never seen such, such . . . But señora.” The taller man produced a cumbrous electric torch, almost as long as his arm. “That is not—all.”

  The light flowed up over the body. Boots, legs, torso, chest, the serape dragged aside, the shirt torn or opened loose, the throat.

  “Madre de Dios.” Concepçion had crossed herself before she thought.

  The wounds were shadowed deep as bullet-holes in the slanted glare. Two of them: perhaps the size of a peso, her appalled mind assessed, ragged-edged and sunken each side the jugular vein, as if some giant beast had bitten and sucked—

  A giant version, some tiny crazy voice commented, of the bites left on a cow’s skin by a vampire bat.

  How does he think to feed it, on such a train as this?

  Concepçion shook herself all over and administered the mental equivalent of a ringing slap.

  “Get a blanket. A tablecloth. Something. Cover him up.” First makeshift measures, to keep unexpected witnesses under control. “At Guaqui, someone must—see to this.”